England gear up for biggest ever crowd at the London Stadium for the 2019 World Cup

The inventors of cricket, England is on the threshold of creating history as they are set to play in front of the biggest crowd in the nation when the ICC World Cup will be staged in 2019. The London Stadium which was set up for the Summer Olympics in 2012 is among the 12 venues which will host 48 matches for the quadrennial event. Two matches are expected to be played in Stratford including an England encounter which is expected to be a sell-out.

Around 60,000 people are expected to catch the cricketing action in London which by far will be the highest attendance for a cricket match in the UK. The biggest capacity ground in England at the moment is the Lord’s Cricket Ground which has a capacity of 30,000. The managing director of the 2019 World Cup, Steve Elworthy travelled to New Zealand for analysing the best technology for the drop-in pitches which can be used in Stratford.

ECB chief executive Tom Harrison said it will be an amazing experience to host 60,000 people in a cricket ground in England. “It would be an amazing statement to have 60,000 people in a ground in the UK watching World Cup cricket. The London Stadium has the right dimensions. There are not a lot of other stadiums that have the capacity to fit minimum boundaries in.”

The Stadium won’t host the opening ceremony of the tournament despite having the experience of hosting the 2012 Olympics curtain-raiser. The drop in pitches has been cited as the reason. The organisers of the World Cup will surely want to improve on the opening ceremony after what happened in the previous edition way back in 1999. It is still regarded as one of the worst opening ceremonies in a sporting event after smoke engulfed the ground which prevented crowd viewing.

Apart from the England clash, the other encounter in the stadium might well be between arch-rivals India and Pakistan depending upon the draw.